Paul Winfield, the Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated actor who garnered acclaim on stage and screen, died of a heart attack Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 62.
Winfield's agent Michael Livingston said his client had been battling diabetes and was in ill health prior to his death.
The instantly recognizable Winfield has been a fixture in Hollywood for decades, having appeared in such films as The Terminator and Star Trek II: The Wrath of Kahn and such television shows as Picket Fences and Touched by an Angel.
He made his screen debut opposite Sidney Portier in the 1969 movie The Lost Man. Three years later, he received a Best Actor nod for playing a sharecropper in the movie Sounder. His final role came last year in a TV-movie version of the film.
While his movie work also included prominent roles in Mars Attacks!, Cliffhanger and Under Siege, Winfield kept busy with small-screen gigs.
He appeared opposite Diahann Carroll in the acclaimed 1968 TV comedy Julia, a series which many say opened doors for black actors on television.
Winfield was perhaps best known for his Emmy-nominated role in the 1978 miniseries King, in which he played the title role of Martin Luther King Jr. He picked up another Emmy nomination in 1979 for his role as a Negro spiritual-singing college chancellor in Roots: The Next Generation.
He finally won an Emmy in 1995 for his work as an inner-city judge on the CBS series Picket Fences.
Winfield also had recurring roles in Touched by an Angel and L.A. Law and guest shots on dozens more, including Star Trek: The Next Generation, Babylon 5, The Fall Guy, Murder, She Wrote and Mission: Impossible.
With his booming baritone and commanding presence, Winfield became one of Hollywood's go-to guys when it came to playing authoritative roles, everything from police chiefs to army officers to doctors to principals. He made a mini career out of playing judges. Aside from his stint on the bench in Picket Fences, he played Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall in the TV movie Strange Justice, Judge Larren Lyttle in the Harrison Ford potboiler Presumed Innocent and a jurist in the straight-to-video flick The Killing Jar.
But it wasn't always so easy. "Since I am not particularly pretty and I can't sing or dance, I started off in television with a lot of bit parts either as a black activist or some type of psychopathic heavy," he once told the Los Angeles Times.
His pipes also allowed him to do voice work on several cartoon series, including Batman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond and Spider-Man. Simpsons geeks will know him as the voice of the Don King-esque boxing promoter Lucius Sweet. (Winfield actually played Don King in the TV movie Tyson.)
Winfield also acted in numerous plays, including productions of Othello and Broadway's Checkmates, in which he starred opposite Denzel Washington.
Winfield was born in Los Angeles on May 22, 1941, during a time of social unrest and battles over civil rights.
He was raised by his union-organizer mother and was bused to a predominantly white high school, where he became involved in drama and was named best actor for three years in a row in a Southern California drama competition. Winfield then studied drama in college, though he left the University of California just a few credits short of a degree to pursue acting full time.
He is survived by his Las Vegas-based sister, Patricia Wilson.